Mailchimp vs Brevo
Recognizable marketing suite versus broader budget-friendly marketing and transactional email.
What matters for growth and lifecycle teams
Growth work lives or dies on targeting and measurement. What matters is whether behavioral triggers can be built without engineering time, whether the event stream supports attribution past the open, and whether deliverability holds when broadcast volume shares a reputation with product email.
| Priority | Mailchimp / Mandrill | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling | Yes | Yes |
| Event stream | Yes | Yes |
| Deliverability | Mixed; depends heavily on the shared IP pool you land on. | Reliable for marketing and transactional; per-day free-tier limits prevent spam abuse. |
| Operating since | Not published | 2012 |
| Suppressions API | Yes | Yes |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Free tier | 500 contacts, 1,000 sends/month | 300/day permanent |
| Starts at | $13/mo Essentials | $9/mo for 5,000 emails |
For lifecycle and activation work running behavior-triggered journeys, broadcasts, and winback campaigns measured on revenue, the two are level on every priority that can be scored here, so the choice comes down to price and to which product your team would rather operate. On free tier, Mailchimp / Mandrill offers 500 contacts, 1,000 sends/month against 300/day permanent from Brevo. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Mailchimp / Mandrill | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverability | Mixed; depends heavily on the shared IP pool you land on. | Reliable for marketing and transactional; per-day free-tier limits prevent spam abuse. |
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Free tier | 500 contacts, 1,000 sends/month | 300/day permanent |
| Starts at | $13/mo Essentials | $9/mo for 5,000 emails |
| Tagline | Legacy marketing giant, transactional via Mandrill. | All-in-one with a generous daily free tier. |
| Pricing model | subscriber-based | tiered |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| SDKs | node, python, php, ruby | node, python, go, ruby, php, java, dotnet |
| Templates | rich | rich |
| React Email | No | No |
| Webhooks | Yes | Yes |
| Inbound | No | Yes |
| Idempotency | No | No |
| Dedicated IP | Yes | Yes |
| DX score | 5/10 | 7/10 |
| Best for | Non-technical marketers who already use Mailchimp. | Small businesses that need email plus marketing plus SMS in one place. |
Mailchimp / Mandrill
- ›Recognizable brand
- ›Mature template editor
- ›Large agency ecosystem
- ›Three disclosed security incidents in the twelve months to January 2023, the last via social engineering of staff
- ›Mandrill only available as a paid add-on
- ›API ergonomics feel dated
- ›Pricing opacity
Brevo
- ›Generous permanent free tier
- ›Marketing plus transactional plus SMS
- ›Inbound parsing
- ›Surface area is large; pure-API teams may not want the rest
- ›UI can feel busy